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Builder’s Build Pipeline

One of the core features of Builder is, well, building. So we need to provide the best experience we can. That means we need wide support for build systems and languages. How we get from source code to a product can vary in a multitude of ways.

For example, you might need to alter how you launch programs to run inside a container. You might need access to headers that only exist in the SDK and not the application runtime. You might even need to download or build dependencies for your project at a given point. Furthermore, this could all change based on what plugins you’ve chosen to enable in your Builder environment.

When I set out to create Builder, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to see all the possibilities that Builder needs to handle. So I explicitly avoided designing an abstract solution until I understood the problem better. But I think we understand the problem well enough now. So over the winter holiday I started putting together the design of IdeBuildPipeline.

The pipeline is a one-directional series of build phases. Each phase can have stages attached to it. Builds progress in the order of their attached stages, each of which can be an asynchronous operation. We only need to advance the build up to the requested phase. If the IDE detects something has changed, it can invalidate various phases of the pipeline causing them to be executed again at the next build request.

Plugins should implement the IdeBuildPipelineAddin interface to register any necessary pipeline stages.

Generally, build stages are an IdeSubprocessLauncher, but you can implement custom IdeBuildStage subclasses to do more fancy things. For example, if you need to download something, you might add an IdeBuildStageTransfer and you’ll see the transfer show up in the transfers window.

Of course, some problems are complex enough where we don’t know if they are invalidated upfront and the build stage may query some external resource. For that, the IdeBuildStage class can implement the query signal. Of course we should strive to perform blocking operations asynchronously so consider pausing the stage until your asynchronous request has completed.

We know how difficult it is for newcomers to get started so we’ve taught Builder how to download Flatpak runtimes and SDKs based on your project configuration. That means that you can omit those flatpak install commands from your “project setup” guide. Just clone the project URL and click Build, we’ll take care of the rest.

Thanks to this new design, implementing a build system is much easier. To prove this, I finally implemented a basic cmake+ninja plugin in a matter of an hour. Check it out here. If you’d like to write CFLAG extraction for cmake, we could use that still!